Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China (review)

Abstract

Yingjin Zhang Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China University of Hawai'i Press, 2010. xii, 257 pp. $49.00 (cloth) Yingjin Zhang, who has previously written seven books on Chinese film studies, views what he terms as the messy state of contemporary Chinese (26) through several theoretical frameworks, namely that of place, space, translocality, or the coexistence of different locales in the same urban area, and polylocality, or the tension among these translocalities. His frameworks seem to come in threes: three concepts of space (1), three theoretical frameworks of space and cinema (2), three conceptualizations of globalization (5), three areas of translocality (9), not to mention three significant shifts in Chinese and three avant-garde movements in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong in the 1980s (21). At times his analysis is choppy and repetitive, perhaps reflecting his dense references and quotes in the opening chapters. His most valuable contribution is to move criticism beyond films by the so-called Fifth Generation of directors, who came of age in 1982 as the first graduates from film academy since the end of the Cultural Revolution, to more contemporary films and documentaries, many of which were produced independently of state production facilities and/or with capital from outside China. With China's rapid rise on the global stage over the past thirty years, it is inevitable that globalization and the dislocation of millions of people from the hinterland to the coastal cities in search of factory jobs has affected its film industry. In fact, the salient difference between the so-called Sixth Generation of Chinese directors, dating from the early 1990s, and the Fifth Generation of directors, is the former's focus on what Doreen Massey terms as stories-so-far(i), characterized by Zhang as protagonists cut off from a rooted past: More than 'mapping'-an attempt to formulate a rigidly coordinated mental map of the cityscape, Chinese cinema of the new century seems to have discovered in an aesthetically gratifying, cognitively challenging, and psychologically complicating mode of urban imagination. Drifting captures a raw documentary effect, projects fantastic kaleidoscopic images, and enables perpetually changing psychological and emotional flows. (78) To illustrate drifting as a new mode of cinematic remapping (78) Zhang uses four films from the first decade of the new millennium, each with a different mode of transportation as central focus: the bicycle in Beijing Bicycle (2001), the motorcycle in Big Shot's Funeral (2001), the taxi in I Love Beijing (2001), and the airplane in The World (2004). …